In commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 209,275 filed Nov. 21, 1980 by one of us, Wolfgang Fehrenbacher, there has been disclosed an alarm clock provided with a buzzer or other signal generator which is actuated by the closure of contacts upon the axial shifting of an angularly settable control disk slidable on an hour shaft of the clockwork, the control disk and an adjoining hour wheel rigid with that shaft having mating formations such as a sawtooth-shaped cam and a cutout which are mutually aligned every 12 (or possibly every 24) hours. The disk is axially loaded by a leaf spring urging it toward the hour wheel; a tab on the spring is engageable by a detent for inhibiting or terminating the operation of the alarm. Also disclosed in that copending application is an escapement mechanism including a manually operable knob with a flexible stem which carries a pinion normally engaging gear teeth on the control disk; when rotation of that disk is blocked by its engagement with the hour wheel, the pinion is cammed out of meshing engagement with the disk teeth when a user turns the knob in an attempt to reset the alarm time.
The leaf spring disclosed in the copending application has one end fixedly secured to a boss rising from a mounting plate which is penetrated by an assembly of nested clockwork shafts including the aforementioned hour shaft. The opposite, free end of that spring can be engaged by the alarm-inhibiting detent and could also carry a movable contact element of a switch designed to close the operating circuit of the buzzer in the alignment position of the control disk and the hour wheel, even though the switch contacts actually shown in that application are closed by the control disk. In view of the cantilevered structure of the leaf spring, both the movable contact element and the inhibiting detent ought to be located as far as possible from the fixed end of that spring for reliable operation. There are, however, instances in which it would be more convenient to arrange both the switch contacts and the inhibiting means at some other point, e.g. in the vicinity of an axial plane transverse to the swing plane of the spring.